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Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

danluu.com

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Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#91

Post by klyrs »

bawolff wrote: post #59
infogulch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strategy seems to be especially effective for focused communities as they grow from 50-5000 users. As you approach facebook scales and a more generalized audience ("the public") I'd imagine the optimal strategy may shift some. A federation (small "f") of smaller, more focused communities might be the best you can hope for.

I think wikipedia serves as an example of community governance on a large scale. Not quite facebook scale, but en wikipedia has 126,000 users who have taken an action in the last 30 days, which is pretty big scale. Then again the wikipedia community is full of drama.

Can you point me to a human community of 100k individuals that isn't full of drama? Asking for a friend

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#92

Post by dewey »

singron wrote: post #88
bawolff wrote: post #57

I largely agree, although i think the author misses on some of the examples. Reddit is not an example of being bad due to this affect, but an example of being good because of it. Reddit is not one huge platform but a combination of thousands of subreddits independently moderated. That is how reddit remains good, because small subreddits have small scale. Running your own email server isn't a counterexample, but is le…

My experience running my email server is exactly what danluu says. Receiving emails and classifying spam is not a problem at all, but my outgoing mail is often blocked. It's not that I struggle to moderate the whole world, but the whole world is moderating me.

> It's not that I struggle to moderate the whole world, but the whole world is moderating me.

Wouldn't that be the "best case" for email because of the centralized idea? In reality it's a few huge companies that matter and if you end up on one of their lists because of some bad IP, missing header etc. you are a bit out of luck.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#93

Post by selcuka »

bawolff wrote: post #57

I largely agree, although i think the author misses on some of the examples. Reddit is not an example of being bad due to this affect, but an example of being good because of it. Reddit is not one huge platform but a combination of thousands of subreddits independently moderated. That is how reddit remains good, because small subreddits have small scale. Running your own email server isn't a counterexample, but is le…

> you aren't moderating a small community, you are moderating the whole world

Sure, but you are still moderating for a small community. One person's spam is another's ham, so it's much more difficult for Gmail to be as accurate as my spam filter (which only needs to learn from a couple hundred people's preferences) because it will inevitably overfit.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#94

Post by hughesjj »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it. People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go. People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services…

> People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse Did you live in a small city back then?

Fwiw I used to live in small towns until I graduated college and the taxis in Pennsylvania sucked no matter where I was

Now Uber/Lyft aren't great, but it's still way better seeing the driver on the map when they're running late than having literally no idea and having to call dispatch who themselves will begrudgingly call the driver who will just give a bs status anyway

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#95

Post by lotsofpulp »

kurthr wrote: post #90
Animats wrote: post #82

This is easy to fix. Make Amazon responsible for warranting all sales on their platform. Amazon claims they are not the seller, some anonymous party running an ad on their platform is the seller. That was litigated in Pennsylvania, and when it got to the level that Amazon was looking at a major lose, Amazon settled to avoid a precedent. On the ad front, anyone who runs an ad for a third party should have to be able t…

KYC or you're liable. Interesting solution. It's kinda amazing it's not already that way (since advertisers need to get paid). I guess it would make it harder to advertise, if you're not already big so that could hurt little guys, but so is scamming customers.

KYC just incentivizes discrimination. Eventually ends up with innocent people not being able to get bank accounts or rent hotel rooms because they get associated with prior probabilities that do not necessarily apply to them, aka discrimination.

Punishing scammers to dissuade and reduce the quantity of scammers is the government’s job and should not be laid on businesses, for a well functioning high trust society.

If international jurisdictions are a problem, then the national government needs to provide an identify verification API for businesses so they know the customer they are dealing with is subject to the legal system of the country.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#96

Post by AlienRobot »

tomcam wrote: post #75
infogulch wrote: post #10

Way back in 2014 when Jeff Atwood (aka codinghorror) switched from Stack Overflow to creating Discourse, he gave a talk about it (see notes [1], sadly I can't find a live link to the recording anymore). He gave a pithy little explanation of why they built the Discourse trust levels system the way they did that stood out to me: > The only thing that scales with the community is the community. The point being, you have…

> The point being, you have to grow users into moderators Aka free labor?

We prefer to call it voluntary labor.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#97

Post by Nursie »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #95
kurthr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KYC or you're liable. Interesting solution. It's kinda amazing it's not already that way (since advertisers need to get paid). I guess it would make it harder to advertise, if you're not already big so that could hurt little guys, but so is scamming customers.

KYC just incentivizes discrimination. Eventually ends up with innocent people not being able to get bank accounts or rent hotel rooms because they get associated with prior probabilities that do not necessarily apply to them, aka discrimination. Punishing scammers to dissuade and reduce the quantity of scammers is the government’s job and should not be laid on businesses, for a well functioning high trust society. If…

This is nonsense. Businesses are not above the law and claiming that you are only a proxy or that what you do is too complex shouldn't get you out of having to follow those laws.

We're talking KYC (or direct liability) for businesses here. There is nothing discriminatory about it.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#98

Post by Nursie »

Aurornis wrote: post #13
andy99 wrote: post #7

The real "economy of scale" in these platforms is not actually providing any support , moderation, fraud prevention. It's not that they scale it better, it's just that they don't do it and get away with it through market power. If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business. If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to d…

> If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it. People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go. People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services…

Uber was needed to give cab companies in a lot of places a proper kick in the pants, but it is now usually worse in my experience.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#99

Post by smallmancontrov »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #33
ec109685 wrote: post #8

Amazon selling obviously fake SD cards / flash disks is baffling. It’s super easy to spot and fake disks cost users data, so you’d think they’d take that seriously. https://a.co/d/auXcxrZ ($29 for 1TB as their “overall pick”)

Some work I supervised sampling Amazon and Ebay products for vendor malware showed an absolutely shocking prevalence of dodgy goods. I don't think they can stem the tide.

The same ebay scammer has been popping the same fraudulent listings into my feeds every few weeks for the last 8 years. Their "pay through (external url)" URL always uses Comic Sans, so I call them the "Comic Sans Scammer." If ebay was trying, I suspect that these listings would have changed a bit to evade detection, but the only thing that ever changes is the compromised account name.

To ebay's credit, their support is very good once you are on the "press button, get called seconds later by a human" tier, but I also make ebay a lot of money, so I'm not sure how common it is to receive that level of service.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#100

Post by staticautomatic »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it. People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go. People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services…

> People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse Did you live in a small city back then?

I live in SF and my pre Uber experience was about as nonexistent as the cabs and the people at the cab company who were supposed to answer the phone.
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